


Fruit

by pangodillO



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Multi, Nymphs & Dryads, treearl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 05:59:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14302332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pangodillO/pseuds/pangodillO
Summary: "Trees don't have anger," Earl said.  "Trees are never impatient."





	Fruit

Earl liked the soft golden-orange light of sunset best.

If he were properly rooted, he'd want full daytime sun most of the time, bright and hot on green leaves. But he was forever an early-autumn being, and the red in his hair loved best the red of a sunset. 

(His birthday was in May, and he sometimes wondered whether his mother had been all russet and gold when his father had—but he didn't like to think about that. He didn't even know how long he'd gestated; by the time he was old enough to wonder where he'd come from, his father had been too drunk and angry to tell him.)

Most evenings, before dinner, he liked to walk out in the yard, barefoot, and let the warm light nourish him. He didn't need to; as long as he ate and breathed, the extra boost of energy and oxygen was unnecessary. But it felt good, and it made him feel stronger. Fresh.

He heard the back door open, and then close. He heard—almost felt, through the earth, the footsteps across the lawn. There was no urgency to it, so he simply waited. 

"Photosynthesizing?" Carlos asked, with interest.

"Yes," Earl said. 

"What do you think about?"

Carlos was better about patience, now. He stood next to Earl and leaned on him, and Earl stood up straight under his weight the way a tree should, and let his thoughts find words slowly.

"The sun," he said.

A minute later, he added: "Wind."

Carlos hummed, turning his face in and kissing Earl's shoulder through his bark—his shirt, his shirt, not his bark. 

He'd given enough of an answer, Earl knew; Carlos was satisfied, but—he was still here. Leaning on Earl, being patient. Surely he deserved something more, for that?

"Roots," he admitted quietly. Digging down through soft wet earth, twining in to become inseparable, immovable. "Leaves." Breathing the waste air of the world, making it fresh again. "Fruit." Soaking up life from the earth and life from the sun at once, reaching up up up and down down down and gathering the world's energies to fill his hands with sweet, for Cecil and Carlos to take and eat beneath his branches.

"Could you bear fruit?" Carlos asked, turning to look up at him. Into his hair, which was the wrong place.

"Yes." That answer was incomplete. "Not without rooting down."

"Would that be good for you?" Carlos hummed thoughtfully. "Over winter, maybe? I know that season's hard for you."

"Yes..." Earl said, slowly. It would be good, for him. "I would be... slower. I would be less human. Less like my father." He breathed the cooling autumn air and tilted his face back to catch the fading sun on his skin. "Trees don't have anger," he said. "Trees are never impatient. With my feet in the earth and my hands in the sky I could purify your air and make your food, and I would never, ever leave you."

"You-plural," Carlos clarified. "Us. Cecil and me."

"You-plural," Earl agreed. 

"Why don't you?" Carlos said. "I know you want to stay and take care of us, but we could get by for a season."

"I can't," Earl said.

"You sound like you want to."

"I do." Earl wriggled his bare toes deeper into the soft earth. It would be so lovely to just stay here, to be able to always watch over his Carlos, his precious Cecil. To see them eat of him, his very own body nourishing and sustaining them. "It would be bliss."

"Then—"

"I wouldn't come back." Earl pulled his feet free from the earth and turned his back to the sunset, striding toward the house. He had dinner to make.


End file.
